French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term Cubism, or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity, and to enforce one reading of the picture – that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas".[1] The Cubist movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe.

A major idea of Braque's was the fractured stringed instrument as a cubist model. This he painted a number of times with variations, and made sculptures with fractured violins, guitars, etc., inside transparent acrylic (perspex) blocks. Examples:

Violin and Candlestick, Paris, spring 1910, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.